So the rumor that's been sitting in my browser tabs all week: Bloomberg reported Microsoft is in talks to buy Discord, for something north of $10 billion. Not a done deal. Just "talks," which in tech-reporting-speak usually means somewhere between "a banker floated it" and "there's a term sheet on someone's desk." Either way, it's been rattling around my head since I read it and I have Feelings about it.
I want to be clear about what Discord actually is to me before I get into why this bugs me. I've got four servers I check daily. One is a dumb group chat with college friends that's been running since 2017 and is 90% memes about a show none of us watch anymore. One is for a Minecraft server that maybe six people still log into. It is, genuinely, one of the only pieces of software I use every single day that doesn't feel like it's trying to sell me something every time I open it. No feed algorithm shoving garbage at me, no "sponsored" anything, just channels and voice chat and people I actually know.
And Microsoft's track record with acquired communication tools is, to put it gently, not great. I don't think I need to explain the Skype thing to anyone reading this in 2021. It went from "the app everyone used to call their grandparents" to a bloated, laggy mess that somehow gets worse with every redesign. I still have to use it for a client call once a month and I dread it every time — the notification sounds alone should be studied by the Geneva Convention people. If that's the roadmap for Discord, count me out early.
To be fair, I get why Discord might want this. Running servers at that scale costs real money, and Nitro subscriptions (I pay the $9.99 a month, mostly for the bigger upload limit if I'm honest, the custom emoji stuff is a nice bonus) probably don't cover it on their own. A pile of Microsoft cash solves a lot of problems. I just don't think it solves the problem of "please don't turn this into Teams with a slightly different color scheme." Teams is a program I am contractually obligated to open for work and I would not wish it on an enemy.
Anyway. Nothing's confirmed, this could fall apart in negotiations the way these things sometimes do, and I'll probably write about it again if it actually happens. For now I'm just going to keep hoping it doesn't.
Unrelated tangent, but I can't not mention it: I have had a browser tab open to a live ship-tracking site for four straight days now, because of that container ship stuck sideways in the Suez Canal. I don't know when "watching a stationary cargo ship on a map" became my bedtime routine but here we are. Woke up this morning to see they'd apparently gotten it moving again after nearly a week of tugboats and one very famous small excavator doing its best. Feels like the whole internet collectively exhaled at once. I have no tech angle on this really, I just think it's funny that a boat problem was more consistently entertaining than most television this month, and that I now know what "beam" means in relation to ship width, which is a fact I will never need again.
Back to actual work now. I've got a WordPress plugin update to test that's been sitting in my queue since Tuesday and I keep putting it off because the changelog is three lines long and none of them explain what actually changed, which is my other complaint for the week but a much smaller one.